Tech tools gone wrong

When I first became active on Twitter, I followed the general #edchat quite a bit and was stunned and fascinated by all the tech tools people were tweeting about. I read blog posts and reviews about the latest web 2.0 tool someone was using in X class and got excited. I tried many new tools (that aren’t new anymore – that’s how the tech world works!) and some worked, some didn’t. Along the way I learned a lot of lessons and developed a lot of just plain opinions about technology integration in the world language classroom. Humor me for a minute and see what you think.

Too much of a good thing?
I do want to emphasize that technology is a beneficial and important part of any classroom, including world language classrooms. But where do WL teachers go wrong when implementing them? I think the problem is excitement over using them combined with a simple lack of evaluation.

Too much time from learning languageWhen students spend more time putting a movie together than using the target language, the tech tool has gone wrong. This is especially a problem in lower level classes. Novice learners do not have the language to work on a project and maintain target language with their peers. My AP Spanish students have difficulty sustaining the level of planning and reaction required to do this. So when students have spent 30 minutes of a 50-minute class period hashing out in English how to upload photos to VoiceThread, it’s time to reevaluate.

No life skillsThe tool also goes wrong when we fail to ask the question, what life skill does this develop? Are students thinking critically? Defending opinions? Negotiating community? Or are they just playing with a tool? Sometimes this is a problem with the task instead of the tool. If students are using Prezi, fine, but use it as an opportunity to build students’ presentation skills, definitely a life skill highly needed in many professions.

Frustrating learning curveI’m sure you’ve seen these tools – I’ve been reviewing online publishing tools lately (think magazines) and they fall into this category more often than not. It takes so long to figure out how to use the tool to do anything, it frustrates me and so not only am I not using language, I’m not likely to ever use this tool again.

Worst tech tools

What tools fall into these categories? Again, any tool can go wrong fast and most tools can be used well. For me, the tools that fall into these categories are VoiceThread (way too much work for way too little language), Voki (it’s good for one time in low levels, but nearly useless after that), and Powerpoint (so many better tools to foster presentational skills). My question is – if you’re using a tool to get a student to speak a sentence, maybe two, and then rework or listen to the same sentence over and over, and then abandon it – why not just get them using meaningful language in context and drop the tool altogether?However, there is the argument that some of these are motivating. Maybe students who will not talk in class will use a Voki to talk for them with excitement you’ve never seen in them before. I love motivation – great – do the activity – but don’t dwell on it, don’t make it a common thing, don’t give up on developing that student’s life skills. Otherwise you’ll end up with a student who can make a Voki like a pro but can’t speak the language and can’t talk in front of people.
Incidentally, as an alternative to VoiceThread, I like Yodio. It’s super easy for students to call in a comment on a photo from their phone, and you drag and drop it into the photo to make a slideshow of photos and student comments. It’s still not a lot of language, but it’s an easy and fast tool that can be fun one day and then be left for another time.

Tech tools gone right

Don’t get me wrong; I love using technology. But it has to be used well or we’re wasting everyone’s time. What makes the use of a tech tool go well?

Culture: Good technology integration adds an element of culture, or lets you do it.

Future use: You’re doing students an extra favor if you’ve chosen a tool that they may use in other classes or their future, whether in college or a profession.

Motivating: Students enjoy using it (rather than getting frustrated or bored). This supports forming good brain connections.

Supported by your infrastructure: If your school network or systems or devices can’t handle the tool, your plans will go awry.

Authentic: The best tech integration for world language teachers uses authentic tools- media in the target language, changing Google News to another country, or change the language on Audio Lingua.

Google Drive: For a place for students to collaborate on writing, for me to share questions with sources, etc., Google Drive is our favorite.

Prezi: Personally, my favorite presentation tool. But I don’t care which presentation tool students are using, as long as it’s 1) easy to use and 2) not Powerpoint. I just want them to realize there’s more out there than Powerpoint.

Glogster: We love Glogster because of how it puts multiple media together – audio, video, writing. Our only problem with Glogster is that it can take forever to upload media.

Edmodo: Sharing links, free-topic blogging, cross-school interaction, and infographic quizzes are a few of the ways we use Edmodo. Let me know if you’d like to join AmigoWeb, our multischool collaboration group, to see how students are communicating with each other.

14 Comments

Excellent post! Thank you for sharing. One tech tool that I love is Google’s Blogger, students set up blogs at the beginning of my class and post their Tarea Semanal there each week and I am able to comment and communicate easily. Also, they can post audio, video, and links there and easily share it with me and classmates. And, it having a blog (website) is something that will definitely help them in the future.

We love blogging too! We used to use Blogger but we’ve switched to Edmodo because I feel like my students interact more with each other and other students there. But we successfully used Blogger for a long time.

Hi Sara-Elizabeth, I agree with you that there is so much technology out there and the learning curve is sometimes not worth it. I always felt a little guilty not utilizing more tech in my classes. I can’t even claim that I’m an “old fashioned” teacher, but I believe what’s most important is for the students to learn to communicate. I’m always telling them that the “A” on paper means nothing if they cannot communicate….anyway I digress….this year I opened an Edmodo account, thinking that the students would jump at the opportunity. It seems however that that is not the case. They tell me they do not go online; I say if it’s part of your homework, why would you not? I find that they are still not motivated to participate on Edmodo, so I ask myself, what am I doing wrong, not doing? How am I not motivating them? I’ve posted videos, asked questions on Edmodo, but that does not seem to work. Any ideas? Anybody?

Thanks for the great question, Loly. Here are two quick tips that come to my mind-
1) Stop posting videos and have the students do the work. Have a contest for them to submit a crazy video or photo in the TL that they find online. Post the winner, then have another contest to see who can make the most creative/funny caption for the video/photo. Offer a piece of chocolate (really, the kudos of their peers is what they’ll really want) for the winner.
2) If you have access to a computer lab at school, do the work at school. Set aside a class period for students to build their profile (and Edmodo will let them change the language to Spanish). Encourage creative pictures and favorite quotes. Ask three students to post something interesting – plot of a movie, weird food they tried, something like that – and have everyone else comment. Students have to include at least one question. Since I started *requiring* interaction from students as part of their blog grade, they’re actually having a lot more fun with it, teasing each other and such.
Anyone else?

My name is Claire and I’m a secondary Spanish teacher in training. I love your blog and I’m having a lot of fun exploring it. This post struck me because I am in a teaching with technology class and we’re being exposed to a lot of tools and I do not have a great way of evaluating them for my personal classroom. I really appreciate your insight on what will make a tool really valuable and worthwhile. I love Prezi, Google Docs and the potential for video cameras. With regards to finding valuable resources, especially student-accessible authentic language sites, do you have any tips on where to begin the search and how to navigate to useful resources within the masses on the internet? I have found so far that the most useful resources have been other teachers’ blogs (so thank you bloggers!) but I would appreciate your thoughts.

Here are some of my experiences that I think I may use in the future:

Something that I think I might want to expose my future students to is Podcasting. I like both the potential it has for them creating their own podcasts and being able to evaluate their oral production as well as for them listening to authentic speech that is comprehensible. I like Notes in Spanish, which has many levels.

Another tool I was exposed to that could be useful for collaborative writing assignments is: Primary Pad. It is similar to Google Docs, but you are able to replay the creation of the document and each person is assigned a color so that you can keep track of who is participating.

Thanks, I will have to check out PrimaryPad. Podcasting is also a great idea, a way for them to really get involved with technology they can use in the future while producing and evaluating real language. Audioboo is a good app I’ll be reviewing soon.

For authentic language sites, I like corporate sites, news, and magazines online. Check out my list of corporate websites and my review of e-magazines. My preference is sites without a lot of potentially risque content (even the Latin Grammy site is difficult), not heavy on the ads, and not requiring a login. YouTube is a favorite, of course.

[…] those educators who feel like technology is the be-all, end-all of education. I believe that it was Sara-Elizabeth Cottrell who said something to the effect of “technology for the sole purpose of using technology does […]

If you have a smart phone friendly school, Splice is a great app for making videos. You can use video and pictures as well as music, voice overs, and typed words. It is intuitive to use and then you can just use a cell phone/usb cord to transfer the data to your computer. You don’t have to worry about huge file sizes in emails. 🙂

Poll everywhere is also cool. I think of this as a better tool than clickers, but the same engagement level. Use the website to create questions. Students can use their phones or a computer to text in their answers. You can do different types of questions such as multiple choice or open ended. I like to project the answers because when students make mistakes and see other students’ correct answers, they quickly self-correct.

If you use Schoology in your district, there is also a forum or discussion board, which you can change the settings to not allow kids to see others’ answers until they have submitted their own. “Negotiating Community” could be their communication as they respond to each others’ opinions.